Posted by Corina MacDonald on Vague Terrain: The fifth and final DOCAM Summit took place two weeks ago in Montreal. Over five years the project, spearheaded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to investigate the issues inherent to the documentation and conservation of media arts heritage. The project produced a great collection of tools and resources that are now freely available on the DOCAM website to artists, curators, conservators, archivists and anyone else concerned by the future of artworks with technological components.

Many themes and discussions emerged during the single day of the Summit that I was able to attend – we were exposed to a wide swath of interrelated issues and topics that are central to the research axes of DOCAM: conservation, documentation, cataloguing, terminology, pedagogy and the history of technology. Continue reading

Since the 1950s, guerrilla sign ontologists, situationists and psychogeographers have delighted in using the power of the map to decode the urban landscape. They have explored Manchester using a map of Milan, wandered Newcastle guided by a map of the Berlin U-Bahn, and explored Hackney with a map of the moon. This re-use of maps may at first sight seem to be a simple economy measure, but these were in fact experiments aimed at creating spatial détournements, subverting the commodified image of the city. By the intentional misreading of city space, the city would “be experienced not as a thing at all, but as possibilities”. Our ritual walks are in contrast to the concept of the dérive meaning an aimless walk that follows the whim of the moment, sometimes translated as a drift. Continue reading

hint.fm: The Joy of Revelation through Expressive Visualization: Two of the very best visualization designers and researchers around today, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, have started a new website, titled Hint.fm (or it exists much longer and I just didn’t know). The website collects their past presentations, publications, exhibitions, press coverage, and all of their works, of which Many Eyes, FleshMap, and Phrase Nets are just a few. Most projects are remarkable in their apparent focus on combining the aspects of beauty and story-telling through the presentation data. As they state themselves in the colophon, “Unlike … traditional uses, we believe visualization to be an expressive medium that invites emotion.” Continue reading

User Labor Markup Language (ULML) posted on Serial Consign by Greg J. Smith:

The … screen capture is pulled from the explanation for Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan’s exciting new User Labor project. With this venture, Burak and Engin have developed User Labor Markup Language (ULML), an XML format for determining the value of online activity, interaction and connectivity. The project neatly dovetails with other web initiatives like Data Portability and OpenSocial but moves beyond discussions about online identity and data ownership into the realm of quantifying the value of user contributions to web services. The User Labor statement contextualizes the project in light of a Web 2.0 business model we have all become rather accustomed to: Continue reading

[Sylvère Lotringer, Baja California, Mexico (2009). Photograph: Iris Klein] From Frieze Magazine, Issue 125 — Intelligence Agency: Theorist Sylvère Lotringer talks to Nina Power about art and the market, the failings of capitalism and how radical thinking can help us survive ‘the system’:

Born in Paris, Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne before he moved to New York in the early 1970s, and founded the journal Semiotext(e). In 1975 he organized the ‘Schizo-Culture’ conference at Columbia University, New York, at which Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari addressed an audience of thousands, and in 1978 ‘The Nova Convention’, a three-day homage to William S. Burroughs. Lotringer was responsible for introducing the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio and others to America through the publication of the small, desirable Foreign Agents book series. Continue reading

[Image: Cover of Brian Eno's 1974 album "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)"] Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics by Geeta Dayal, Rhizome.org:

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like “control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. “Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking… a whole system is a living system is a learning system,” as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Continue reading

Urgent Aphorisms: Notes on Organized Networks for the Connected Multitudes by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (The OrgMen) [posted on Net Critique] [Forthcoming in Mark Deuze (ed.) Managing Media Work, Sage, 2010]

Four Stages of Web 2.0 Culture: Use. Modify. Distribute. Ignore. – Johan Sjerpstra

In between the blog posting and the tweet there is the aphorism, a centuries old literary form that should do well amongst creative media workers. Zipped knowledge of the 21st century.

Already for 18th century German experimental physicist and man of letters, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, there was an impossibility for knowledge to capture the totality of things. ‘It is a question in arts and sciences whether a best is possible beyond which our understanding cannot go’ (Lichtenberg). The answer to Twittermania is not the thousand page magnum opus. Today, in a techno-culture where the link never ends, there is a need to give pause to thought. Continue reading

“Ever since we published Ken Wark’s Gamer Theory I’ve tended to think of the author of a networked book as a leader of a group effort, similar in many respects to the role of a professor in a seminar… If the print author’s commitment has been to engage with a particular subject matter on behalf of her readers, in the era of the network that shifts to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a particular subject.”

Originally posted by Bob Stein on if:book:

The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute’s work. I’m hoping for a lot of feedback… Continue reading

[Image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)] Modulated Mapping: Talking with Jeremy Hight about Layers, Channels and  Social Augmented Experience originally posted on UgoTrade:

Tish Shute: I know you have been involved in locative media from its early days. Perhaps we can talk about how AR continues the locative media journey?

Blair MacIntyre gave me this distinction, recently: “AR is about systems that put media out in the world, and immerse you in a mixed space. Even the current “not really registered” mobile phone AR systems are still “sort of” AR (e.g., Layar, etc).

Locative media/ubicomp/etc are very different, in that they tend to display media on a device (phone screen) that is relevant to your context, but does not attempt to merge it with the world. The difference is significant, and making it clear helps people think about what they do and what they want to do, with their work. The locative media space though points toward future AR systems (when the technology catches up!).” Continue reading

Watching the evolution of the “Origin of Species” [Posted by Ben Fry on Processing]: I’ve just posted a new piece that depicts changes between the multiple editions of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:

To quote myself, because it looks important:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself. Continue reading